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Remove and Sort Using - Adds a context menu entry to Solution Explorer that sorts and removes using statements on every file in the solution, project, or on the individual file.

Format Document - Adds a context menu entry to Solution Explorer and the code window that executes the Edit-Advance-Format Document command on every file in the solution, project, or current code window.

Open Folder in Windows Explorer - Extends the Open Folder in Windows Explorer context menu option to the code editor and to all files in solution explorer.

NuGet (formerly NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

Unless it has gotten a whole lot more robust since I used it last (2 years ago) I will just stick with tortoise.
– Sky SandersMay 3 '10 at 12:44

2

It has gotten a lot more robust -- we have had no problems with it. I personally still stick with Tortoise because I don't like SCC in the IDE. It just gets too confused.
– Dave MarkleMay 3 '10 at 12:57

1

AnkhSVN is weird and unstable. I use VisualSvn, it's worth the money.
– Ivan G.Apr 21 '11 at 21:23

I think this tool is horrible. It generates useless comments that are really useless. It might seem nice to generate automatic xml comments but "set or get a value indicating wether this instance is dirty" Is this really useful on a property named "IsDirty" ? It's adding useless lines in your code in my opinion. If you have to make an Xml comment that is useful, then this won't help you because you'll have to write it yourself anyway.
– StéphaneMay 3 '10 at 16:25

18

@Stephane: The comments aren't meant to be used as-is. They're designed to be a template for a human being to flesh out. As such I find it very useful.
– TrueWillMay 3 '10 at 17:01

3

@Stephane TrueWill is right this is a template for generating nice documentations, besides if you look at NET framework comments, you can see that all of them have a certain language template, I do that in my own component via gostDoc. This is very important when deploying a public API, the documentation has to be consistent, lexically.
– BartoszAdamczewskiMay 3 '10 at 20:12

10

As a "template for a human being to flesh out", the tool makes no sense. All you have to do is type /// (or ''' in VB) to get a template to flesh out. The only thing GhostDoc adds is text that it makes up from the name of the member...text which is therefore useless to any human being with half a brain.
– Ryan LundySep 25 '10 at 4:18

7

"Obvious" documentation is useless documentation. People don't look at documentation to learn the obvious. Look, go to your project properties under Build and in the Suppress warnings box, type 1591. There, now you won't get pinged about missing documentation. Now you can type real documentation where it's needed instead of using GhostDoc to generate undocumentation just to avoid a warning when you compile. If I sound a bit vehement here, it's because I've been a victim of GhostDoc-created "documentation" in the past. Don't waste your time creating undocumentation to waste my time.
– Ryan LundyMay 10 '11 at 23:06

It's way better than Resharper (which by the way always slowed down my VS to a crawl), it works with C# and VB.NET (including refactoring) and the support and community is excellent. Worth the price tag. And yes, it does support 2010 (in RC at the time of this writing).

I use AnkhSVN and it didn't add any files to the repository. Visual SVN server is great, so I would imagine the client is as well. But I'm not sure what it would offer me over AnkhSVN.
– Sam HarwellMay 3 '10 at 19:00

1

The last time I tried it, it added .scc files to my project like SourceSafe would. I'm pretty sure that VisualSVN and AnkhSVN have mostly the same feature set, but VisualSVN is my preference.
– jrummellMay 3 '10 at 19:49

I love DevExpress and have it for VS2010. There is however a small annoyance with bringing up the refactor menu after you change an identifier. In VS2008 when you press the VS refactor command (Ctrl+,) it will let you refactor that identifier to the new name. In VS2010 that menu flashes up and disappears and gets replaced by DevExpress menu. You can get the original menu but it takes a bit of fiddling.
– Igor ZevakaMay 3 '10 at 10:40

Code maid was cool, but then it formated some code in a way I didn't like and there is no way to set what the maid should clean and what not. Apart from that my Visual Studio became slow
– RumplinJul 15 '11 at 9:57

Code Contracts Editor Extensions, a free extension which provides information about inherited contracts for the method you're currently working on, and a list of contracts for any methods that you're calling. Unfortunately, the latter feature conflicts with Resharper, but the former still works fine.

RockScroll (free) - Double-click on a word/symbol highlights all occurrences of that word/symbol. Also replaces the scroll bar with a preview of your code, with edit spots and "all occurences" lines highlighted.

Example of use: want to see whether a variable is used anywhere else in current source file? Double-click variable, look at scroll bar for any red highlights.

AtomineerUtils Pro (not free, $9.99 USD) is, in my opinion, better than Ghost Doc. But, just like Ghost Doc or any automatic documentation generator, the generated documentation is meant to be edited to be of any real value.

How many times have you wanted to send a project to a friend or upload
it to a web site like MSDN Code Gallery only to find that your zip
file has lots of stuff that you don't need to send in it making the
file larger than it needs to be.

bin folder obj folder TestResults folder Resharper folders And then if
you forget about removing Source Control bindings whoever gets your
project will be prompted about that. As someone who does this process
a great deal I decided to share with you my code for cleaning a
project.

You can bring up Vingy either by clicking View->Other Windows –> Vingy Search Window from the Visual Studio IDE, or just by high lighting some text in the document and then clicking Tools –> Search Selected Text (Ctrl + 1).

Searching with Vingy is pretty straight forward. You can initiate a Search in two ways.

By typing the text in the Vingy search box and pressing ‘Enter’ or by clicking the ‘Go’ button

By highlighting some text in the editor when you type in Visual Studio, and then pressing Ctrl + 1

The list on this is pretty comprehensive, so I spent sometime to find the extensions that I need. Here is the snapshot. Hope it will help someone.

I tried installing Codemaid, and it appeared to be a nifty addon, but my Visual Studio response became very slow. Felt like some threads were doing some work all the time when Codemaid was on.
So uninstalling for now.

The “Quick Add Reference” extension augments the smart tag that VS shows for unrecognized types giving you a chance to add the corresponding assembly reference for that type plus corresponding “using” clause if needed in a single shot.